


two by two

by story_monger



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Episode: s11e06 Our Little World, Experimental Style, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-12-01
Updated: 2015-12-01
Packaged: 2018-05-04 07:05:33
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,111
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5325005
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/story_monger/pseuds/story_monger
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>it's not like he can forget he's got a sister locked up somewhere, not when everything he creates is testament to it.</p>
            </blockquote>





	two by two

**Author's Note:**

> this is me shoving very loosely interpreted science into the spn mythos.
> 
> read a basic explanation of matter and anti-matter [here.](http://press.web.cern.ch/backgrounders/matterantimatter-asymmetry)

**i.**

in the beginning

they eat each other up

 

**ii.**

in the other beginning

he starts with, _let there be light_ then deletes it. he tries again

_let there be_

 

**iii.**

separation

he starts with the word. around it he builds the absence of the word. it's his first pair; the thing and the not-thing. it feels right.

he moves quickly after that. he pours out a rush of pairs, and they fill the space that had once been on the other opposite of empty.

the first trouble comes almost without him noticing; he glances down and sees that the pairs are swallowing one another up and leaving behind gauzy wisps of intent. he dives down, grabs at leptons and hadrons like glass marbles, kicks away their partners into nothing. her lock buzzes against him.

he almost fails; he’s left with a few handfuls of matter and the darkness.

after—when he’s smoothed it all out so there can be such a thing as time, such a thing as after or before—he watches the survivors while her lock sits beside him. protons and electrons dance themselves into hydrogen while he wonders. it’s the first time he contemplates the wisdom in basing existence on pairs. seemed only right at the time. here is the thing, here is the not-thing. the shape and the space around the shape. no real way to avoid it.

a newcomer finds him like that, sitting among a muttering cloud of particles. it’s someone he’s never met. he can’t remember that happening before.

What are you? is what he asks

the new someone is staid. it watches the hydrogen for a long time before answering.

I’m what happened when your particles unraveled, it says. I’m the unclotting of their energy. I’m the end of a thing.

Ah, he answers.

they sit together and watch the universe discover helium.

Want to see something? he asks. she would have watched expectantly. The newcomer gazes, dour. he pulls out photons and lets there be light, anyway.

better rising action, this time.

 

**iv.**

stars are messy, soupy explosions and he likes them immensely. he has to go way down to the small bits to find the evidence of his mistake in making pairs. he tries to avoid pairs, now, though he slips up if he isn’t paying attention. waves are one; too often two of them meet and cancel out and he is left with a fistful of nothing. he is mortified when he realizes that actions and reactions do the same. one force up, one force down, they both might as well not be there.

but the stars; he thinks he’s hit on success with stars. have to go big, it turns out. haul in as many factors as you can, make them as complicated as possible, and then stars can’t simply disappear when two of them meet. he is pleased.

the newcomer regards the stars with something like respect. but when the first star unravels, the newcomer gathers up the stuff that made it and tosses it out into the dark. it does its job without fanfare; this rankles at him the first time it happens.

the second time a star unravels, he snatches at the wailing remains before the newcomer can. it watches him, silent, and he stuffs the dying star deep into the fabric of existence where it can’t be reached. when he takes a step back, he and the newcomer can see how the fabric twists and stretches, so it just might snap, and they can both hear the dead star screaming, muffled at the far end. he turns away and avoids the newcomer’s gaze. it’s too familiar; he thinks he can hear her screaming, too.

he doesn’t do it again, but he still comes across twisted holes that swallow everything. he’s unsure who makes them, and he’s unwilling to ask.

 

**v.**

the leviathans are a wash. look at them, gulping down one another like it’s nothing. he ought to have seen this coming.

he builds a pocket of a dimension and stuffs the leviathan inside, where they can snap at one another all they like. when he is done, he turns, and the newcomer is there. 

I have a name, it says.

 

**vi.**

angels. he thinks he has found something when he perfects the angel. it’s all photons and will and energy given a name of him.

he is careful. he is so, so careful. he makes one and names it Michael, then another, and he names it Lucifer, and they’re not equal-opposite twins who will eat one another. he knows this because he nudges a bit more of himself into Michael, and he unloads his burden by giving Lucifer the lock that leads to her. they’ll echo him and her now; at least one or even both will survive.

his success makes him heady, and he spins out legions of angels. they surround him and they sing his praises and for a long, long while he is happy.

 

**vii.**

the planets happen half on their own, and seeing them drift through the black gives him ideas. 

he molds a bit of dirt and water, fires it in the heat of the nearest star, and he begins to work. sometimes angels approach him, and he tells them to leave him to his work, and that they’ll see the end result when he’s done. he knows they gossip, but he ignores it.

the first one is simple, just a bit of woven proteins and acids. but he’s happy with it, and the next one is more complicated. he becomes so absorbed that it takes him too long to realize that Death has taken up work beside him, untangling his makings, smoothing out the stuff of them, handing them back for him to reuse. he doesn’t order Death away; he’s not sure it would work.

the first time Death speaks, it’s while the yellow, young star dips below the curve of the planet. he’s busy puzzling out the internal workings of something small and belching.

You think of her often, is what Death says.

he drops the belching thing and it disintegrates back into proteins. he gazes at Death; it watches the star take its leave.

See? Death says. it gestures to the encroaching darkness. A pair. A light time and a dark time. It’s you circling around again to her. 

he’s baffled, staring at the arcing canopy of dim stars. he lifts a hand and tugs at the fabric and rolls a nearby globule of rock so it bashes into their planet. rock and moisture explode outward.

Now, then, he tells Death. when they look up, something white pours light onto them.

There, he tells Death. A little uneven. Now they’ll both survive.

 

**viii.**  

he doesn’t mean to. he really doesn’t. but her presence keep showing up in his work, and before he knows it he’s created inhales to partner with exhales and brains that balance between sympathetic and parasympathetic and trees with roots to echo their branches and paired bundles of DNA dissolving into each another to create a third. the first time he builds a species that has two distinct forms, he’s stunned at his own predictability.

Don’t be so worried, Death advises. Look, they’re complex enough that they’re going start following their own whims soon enough. They’re not copies of you and her, just echoes. Ripples.

he tells Death it’s not helping.

when he creates his first soul, he tells himself it won’t get a twin. he tries, at least, but the solitary soul looks paltry and lost without a partner, and finally, in a pique of surrender, he makes a second. he puts both souls in creatures wandering the central grasslands who are starting to forego their forelimbs.

 

**ix.**

he shouldn’t be surprised when Lucifer stands against him, and yet he somehow is. for a moment, a brief moment, he sees her standing there. his strength fails, and he retreats to a small, empty galaxy while Michael does the job.

he listens to the battle raging and for the first time in a long while, he gives his full thoughts to her. he remembers how close they came to consuming one another entirely. he remembers how she looked when he pulled away just long enough to trap what was left of her, then drag what was left of him into some far corner of existence and tremble. he remembers how he roiled with confused victory; he remembers what it was like to lose a perfect other, a perfect whole. he wishes he could have explained to her that he did it because he values them both too much to let them disappear. he doubts she’d comprehend.

Michael finds him, after.

Lucifer is cast from here, Michael says, And his allies are being tracked down.

he gazes at the first-born of all angels and he sees the way Michael hangs in shreds. the failure is gorgeous.

You’ve suffered too much for it, he tells Michael.

My sisterbrother, Michael says. The other part of me, gone. Yes, father. Lucifer and I ruined most of each other, and here’s what’s left to serve you. It’s the cost.

The cost, he parrots, stupid.

Michael, proud and shining and destroyed, stares at him, then points a sword to the rocky planet and its yellow little star. Your work, Michael says. That was the point. To let them exist.

Oh, he says. he watches the dust mote drift.

 

**x.**

he doesn’t allow himself to be taken aback when a rock cracks the bone of Abel’s skull. not when Lucifer hands Cain the key to her. she must know what she’s doing.

why? he asks Cain in a quite breath.

Cain is unhurried when he answers: He is my brother and the other part of me.

her voice runs beneath Cain’s. he nearly reaches for her then. it so nearly happens.

**xi.**

he goes away.

Michael might suspect where he is; Death shows up every so often and shares gossip. the souls have discovered fire; it was smart to put them in upright, thumbed, sexual creatures. now they have agriculture. they have found out about electrons; they’re lighting up the planet.

A group of them puzzled out matter and the anti-matter in the beginning, Death says during one visit. Do you remember? Carnage.

Are you here to gloat? he asks.

Of course not. It’s interesting. They’ll find you and her next, if they’re not careful.

 

**xii.**

he comes back when her voice has remained quiet for enough millennia. he’s lost an appetite for looking on the tattered remains of Michael and Lucifer playing out their toy-version of him and her. he slips into a soul that fits over him and hides him even from the eyes of archangels.

he puts down a mortgage for an old house in some corner of the dust mote and he starts writing again.

 

**xiii.**

at least he walks into the Winchesters’ story with his eyes wide open to what he’s doing. he knows himself better these days. Death finds it all hilarious, the bastard.

to tick it off, he keeps shuttling souls to it and then snatching them back, over and over. he does it most with Sam and Dean. he only knows how to tell one sort of story; might as well see how it ends.

they’re resilient, is the thing. they keep eating away at each other, but enough of one always remains for them to keep going in limping, rattled tandem. it starts to frighten him.

when one of them crawls back from the cage with most of himself torn away, leaving Michael and Lucifer to the business of hollowing each other out, he retreats again. he’s not sure of the story anymore; he’s forgotten where it was supposed to go, and it’s lasted too long. he thinks it would have been better to let the Winchesters destroy themselves at the very beginning and make a few lines of poetry instead of a saga.

 

**xiv.**

Death leaves as quietly as it came. events are nothing if not symmetrical, balanced on one end to the other; existence doesn’t have any other way to be. he ought to have remembered that before he locked her up and saved them both.

he’s tired.

 

**xv.**

she walks across his earth. she tastes the souls, and she must recognize his work because she finds him like a hound. he can’t care. he’s drunk on the presence of his other self. the sisterbrother. he’d forgotten. he’d forgotten.

 

**xvi.**

they meet in a warehouse in Kentucky. she smiles. he collapses into her.

 

**xvii.**

in the end

it’s


End file.
